A website can look fantastic and still fail at its job. We see it all the time: a business invests in a beautiful website, it goes live, and the enquiries never really pick up. Usually the problem isn’t how the website looks. It’s how it works. That’s user experience, or UX.
Here are the UX concepts that matter most for small businesses, the poor choices we see again and again, and what to do about them, drawn from our work building bespoke websites for businesses across Cornwall and London.
UX is how easy it is for someone to do what they came to your website to do, whether that’s finding a service, getting a price or buying a product. The biggest UX mistake we see isn’t technical: it’s designing around what the business wants to say, rather than what the visitor has come to find out.
For a service business, I like the homepage to answer a simple sequence of questions:
What do you do? → Is it for me? → Why choose you? → What do you offer? → Can I trust you? → What happens next? → How do I get started?
We recently redesigned a website where visitors couldn’t find what they were looking for. The navigation was a dropdown with pages hidden within pages. Our solution might surprise you: we built a mega menu. Most of this client’s visitors knew exactly what they wanted, so seeing everything at a glance let them go straight to the right page.
We also restructured the site and updated all of the on-site SEO. The client began ranking much higher and, for the first time, getting leads through to their service pages.
The lesson: the problem is never the size of the menu, it’s whether it hides things. What I’d warn against is padding out your navigation to make the business look bigger. It complicates the experience and ignores what customers actually need.
Clients understandably want visitors to see everything they offer, but a homepage crammed with services and competing sections makes it harder to know what to do next. Other common requests:
“More isn’t always more. One of the biggest parts of our job is helping clients prioritise what their customers actually need to see, rather than trying to show them everything at once.”
For most SMEs we work with, around 60–70% of traffic comes from mobile, and sometimes much more. A design that shines on desktop can become endless scrolling on a phone, with the main call to action several screens down. The fix is usually to simplify: reorder content, cut what isn’t helping and make the main action prominent.
Tiny buttons, pop-ups you can’t close and overlapping elements tell me nobody has opened the site on their own phone. Testing tools help, but sometimes you just need to pick up your phone and use the website like a customer would.
Before designing anything, we need to understand what the business wants the website to achieve and what visitors actually come to do. We start with a discovery session, review analytics, study competitors (to find opportunities, not to copy), map the user journey and, on larger projects, wireframe before any visual design.
DIY and template builds usually skip this. The result isn’t necessarily an ugly site. It’s a beautiful website that doesn’t generate enquiries, sales or bookings. A website has a job to do, and looking good is only part of it.
We build accessibility in from the start: strong contrast, sensible font sizes, alt text, labelled forms, clear buttons, logical headings, keyboard navigation and never relying on colour alone. If light text over a photo is hard to read, it isn’t good design, so we change the approach. Larger tap areas, clearer labels and simpler navigation make the experience better for everyone.
People are impatient online. Slow sites are rarely down to one big problem; it’s usually oversized images, too many plugins, heavy page builders and unsuitable hosting built up over years.
For online shops, including the WooCommerce sites we build, every delay is a chance to abandon the basket. Make product information easy to find, keep buttons obvious, show delivery costs early, ask only for what you need at checkout and always allow guest checkout. The goal is to make the journey from “I want that” to “I’ve bought it” as short as possible.
Launch is when real evidence starts arriving. Analytics and heatmaps help, but so do simple questions: are enquiries increasing and better quality? Are customers still ringing up to ask questions the website should answer? Are people abandoning forms or checkout?
Leave a site untouched for five years and you’re no longer improving it, you’re replacing it. The clients who get the most from their websites make lots of small improvements over time.
Conventions exist for a reason. People expect the logo to take them home, navigation at the top, buttons that look like buttons and a basket icon that means basket. We’d much rather build a website somebody instantly understands than one they have to learn to use. Your website doesn’t need to impress other web designers. It needs to work for your customers.
Open your website on your phone and use it as if you’ve never seen it before. Find your main service, get a price, make an enquiry. Is it obvious what you do? Can you easily do the thing you most want customers to do? Better still, hand your phone to someone who doesn’t know the site, and don’t help them. You’ll quickly see where the frustrations are.
If that test turned up more problems than you expected, we’d love to help. Say Web Design builds bespoke, mobile-first websites for businesses in Cornwall and London, designed around what your customers actually need. Get in touch to talk about your website.
